A National Vice

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A NATIONAL VICE.

If there be any one characteristic of ourselves, as a people, more prominent than the others, it is our intense love of excitement. We must have our sensation, and we can no more do without it than the staggering inebriate can dispense with his daily dram. Now it is one thing, now another, but by some means and in some shape we contrive to gratify this intense craving after mental stimulus.

This tendency displays itself in a thousand minor ways, but among its broader and more important consequences we may easily point out the gaming propensity. Not alone to the dice box or the faro table do we allude, though Heaven knows there is enough of that kind of thing, and to spare, in existence among us, but to a far more dangerous and ruinous phase of the seductive vice. Most people will not require to be told that we refer to “stock-gambling.” The low “hells” are comparatively deserted now-a-days by intelligent black-legs, and the whilom frequenters of Pat Hearn’s find a safer and more profitable business in Wall street. Here their skill in gulling and plucking becomes quite as available as in more suspicious places of resort, and the same sharpness and low cunning that placed them at the head and front of their former vocation, finds a ready market.

Among all classes, the mania is rapidly spreading. Stock companies multiply on all hands. An evening paper of high standing, published in New York, stated only the other day that it did not believe there were ten merchants in that city who were not more or less given to stock-gambling—that the literary profession are equally beset by the passion; and that (of all persons in the world!) several members of the press had been ruined, financially speaking, by their stock operations.

The prevalence of such a passion among all ranks and classes must be fatal eventually, to any country. Gaming of any description is of its own kind—there are no real distinctions to be made between its various phases. It contemplates the acquisition of money, without rendering an equivalent. It debilitates the moral energies. It deadens the moral sense. It demoralizes the entire man.

In view of this and other equally dangerous elements which are constantly at work among us in our day, and which are sapping the foundations of our national integrity, health and greatness, we confess that we look with fear and trembling towards the future. Some crisis must be surely approaching whose mission it will be to sober and sadden us by some sudden shock—to awaken us from the dreamy indifference with which we allow public virtue and private morality to decline into mere names, signifying nothing. The press and pulpit may declaim and warn, but their words, however often repeated, will be of little avail. A rude but wholesome lesson is needed, and in due time it will come.